August 5, 2016

A Sensual Man

From Heaven and Hell ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

The sensual is the outmost of man's life adhering to and inhering in his bodily part. He is called a sensual man who judges all things and draws all his conclusions from the bodily senses, and believes nothing except what he sees with his eyes and touches with his hands. Such a man thinks in externals, and not interiorly in himself. His interiors are so closed up that he sees nothing of spiritual truth in them. In a word, he is in gross natural light and thus perceives nothing that is from the light of heaven. Interiorly he is antagonistic to the things of heaven and the church. The learned who have confirmed themselves against the truths of the church come to be such. Sensual men are more cunning and malicious than others. They reason keenly and cunningly, but from the bodily memory, in which they place all intelligence. But they reason from the fallacies of the senses.